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There are many ways to expose functionality and data from a server to a client. And there is probably almost as many going the other way… In Microsoft scenarios, using WCF is the obvious choice for most of us, and when people talk WCF, they generally talk SOAP based webservices.

SOAP can however be a less than ideal choice in a some cases. It is way more complicated than some of the other options, and on top of that it has a tendency to bloat the messages being sent, which can be an issue when working with mobile clients for example.

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SignalR is a somewhat newish open source project that makes it possible to simulate push notifications on the web. It does so using long-polling (websockets available as an extra download), so it isn’t true push as such, but it gives the appearance of push. And on top of that, it is so ridiculously simple to set up…

Unfortunately, the NuGet package for SignalR doesn’t include the Silverlight client, which the GitHub project does. This is most likely going to be fixed in the near future, but currently you will have to do it the manual way instead of using NuGet.

The server part of SignalR works fine through NuGet, however, it doesn’t play nice with the Silverlight version as a property has been renamed and causes issues. So we have to do the whole thing manually to make sure both the client and server has the modified property… Once again, it is probably going to be fixed some time really soon.

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Lately I have been working on an Azure project for a client (if you haven’t noticed from my Azure-centric blog posts as of late). A part of this, we have built a WCF service that exposes the functionality that we need. However, we are not actually building a client, only the service. So we don’t have a great way of testing the service. This is obviously where the “WCF Test Client” comes in.

For those of you who don’t know what this is, it is a small client that hooks up to any available service and creates a proxy for you. You can then use this proxy through the interface and call your service.

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I guess it is time for another Azure Service Bus post. The previous ones has been relatively popular, so I thought I would do one more post to cover one last feature in the bus. (I say one last now, but I am pretty sure I will be back…)

Topics and subscribers are the basic units behind the Service Bus implementation of the pub/sub pattern. And as expected from a “simple” pattern like this, it should be simple to implement, and it is. The basics would be, create a topic, add subscribers that subscribe to messages from the topic, and finally push some messages to the topic, which are then relayed to the subscribers. Simple as…

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As I was working with some of my demo code for the Azure posts I have been putting up lately, I came across a very odd thing. I had a solution with several projects that built and worked perfectly fine. I did however need to make some changes to the solution before zipping it up and putting it on my blog. So I made a copy of the solution folder, removed my source control bindings and everything else that shouldn’t be in the zip.

Before zipping it up, I thought I would just make sure it built ok after my changes, which it obviously should as I made no code changes. So I loaded the solution into Visual Studio and everything looked fine. But pressing Ctrl+Shift+B made Visual Studio cough and tell me that XXX was not available in namespace YYY, which is really odd as I had made no code changes.

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I guess it is time for another look at the Azure Service Bus. My previous posts about it has covered the basics, message relaying and relaying REST. So I guess it is time to step away from the relaying and look at the other way you can work with the service bus.

When I say “the other” way, it doesn’t mean that we are actually stepping away from relaying. All messages are still relayed via the bus, but in “the other” case, we utilize the man in the middle a bit more.

“The other” way means utilizing the message bus for “storage” as well. It means that we send  a message to the bus, let the bus store it for us until the service feels like picking it up and handling it.

There are several ways that this can be utilized, but in this post, I will focus on queuing.

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I am now about a week and a half into my latest Azure project, which so far has been a lot of fun and educational. But the funky thing is that I am still excited about working with the Service Bus, even though we are a week and a half into the project. I guess there is still another half week before my normal 2 week attentions span is up, but still!

So what is so cool about the bus, well, my last 2 posts covered some of it, but it is just so many cool possibilities that open up with it.

This post has very little to do with what I am currently working on, and to be honest, the sample is contrived and stupid, but it shows how we can use REST based services with the bus.

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A couple of weeks has gone by since Microsoft unveiled Windows 8 at the BUILD conference in Anaheim, and things are kind of back to normal. Except for the fact that Microsoft has gagged all of their normal information channels.

Apparently, Microsoft representatives are not allowed to talk about Windows 8 at all. And speakers at some conferences have been informed that they are not to talk about Windows 8 on stage. At least not their personal opinions. I assume that they are allowed to talk about the facts that were unveiled in Anaheim…

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I feel that the one thing that has been lacking here at Build is information about the fact that “old” windows application technologies are still there in Windows 8, and are just as much first class citizens as the new Metro style apps. They even have a lot on offer that the new apps don’t.

Microsoft promises that any application that runs on Windows 7 will also run on Windows 8. They are also saying, repeatedly but not loud enough, that the “old” technologies are still a very viable option for developing apps. You should not necessarily default to building a Metro style app when creating a new application. To be honest, in my world at least, I am very likely to lean towards another technology when starting a new project.

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Ok, so a couple of days ago (or something) EPiServer released a module called Mobile Pack. It is built to make it easy for companies to get their website up and running for mobile browsers, which is pretty cool.

It uses “Visitor Groups” and a browser criterion to redirect mobile users to a mobile version of the website. A solution which is actually quite simple, but it works well, and simple well working things are great. At least it works in theory. Unfortunately, in the real world the code doesn’t work…

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